FUBAR
by death muffin
Summary: Movieverse: TS/PP. A series of loosely related one-shots centering around the lives and times of Tony and Pepper. Basically, life is a crazy yet beautiful disaster. It's a military term.
1. Devil

**A/N:** Inspiration struck me _in the face_. Or, I got bored, made an account on LJ and accidentally stumbled on this community that **challenged** me to write about 100 themes. I like challenges, I have a hard time passing them up. Having said that, I am also lazy and busy. And prone to get passionate about writing, only to become dispassionate weeks later. Sometimes it takes years for the interest to come back. Case and point, the still incomplete story I've been working on for the past 4 years. I will probably never make it to the 100th theme. Or I will, it will just take 12 years to do it…

**General Disclaimer:** Me no own. You no sue.

**All of these are also posted in the pepperony100 LJ community under the name citizenkat. Different name, same person.**

**Title: **The Devil's Contract  
**Theme: #**9 Gold  
**Rating:** G  
**Summary:** Pepper has worked with him for a decade. Tony reflects.

Pepper Potts had signed her life away the day she accepted the position as Tony Stark's Personal Assistant. There was a legal binding contract stating that essentially, she was to be at his every beck and call. It was a Devil's Contract, signed in bold black ink.

_10 years_. Tony thought to himself as he had Jarvis make reservations at that Italian place she loved so much.

She'd put up with his shit for 10 years. (He'd given her a lot of shit to put up with.)

It was the longest relationship he'd had with anyone. Ever. Despite his active social life, he had no real friends to speak of. Everyone wanted a piece of him. They were all trying to use him, and he used them in return. He was fine with that, he wasn't a man who needed friends.

But then Pepper came into his life, and slowly over time their working relationship had evolved to include an intimate air of friendship. He supposed it was impossible to work so closely with someone for so long without some amount of friendship developing. But long before he ever even realized what was happening, Pepper had become his closest friend. She was his confidante, keeper of his secrets, signer of his documents, holder of his credit cards, his ever faithful companion.

Even though she had stood by his side for the past 10 years, and knew practically everything there was to know about him, he knew next to nothing about her. He knew she had been born and raised in Baltimore. She had moved out here in order to attend UCLA. She had carefully trained every last scrap of an Eastern accent out of her voice in order to pursue her dreams of broadcast journalism. After her first year of courses, she had realized she was much more comfortable behind a desk than in front of a camera, and switched majors to accounting.

He didn't know much other than that. Talking about Pepper's personal life just simply wasn't done, and he'd never pushed it. Pretty much all he knew about Pepper were things he had observed. For instance, she tried really hard to be obsessively neat when she really wasn't. She always ate healthy, despite the fact that she loved steak. Big medium rare steaks. More rare than medium, actually. And even when she was drunk, she managed to be in control.

And he knew that when she'd first come to work for him a decade ago, she had been engaged. He knew that because there had been a gold ring on her finger. The diamond had been small but brilliant, it seemed to catch the light no matter how she moved. He had never really asked about her fiancée, and she had never really talked about him. She had always been very strict about keeping her professional and personal lives separate.

Once, he had commented on the tiny-ness of the diamond. He told her she should run away to Vegas with him, that he could provide her with a much larger diamond. He had only been half joking.

She had laughed and told him playfully that she wasn't like one of his girls. He couldn't buy her love, no matter how much money he had.

That was the most he could remember them talking about her fiancée. Other than the nights when she had already put in her overtime, and he would try to hang on to her for double overtime, and she would say, "I have to get home, Mr. Stark. I'll finish it first thing in the morning."

Then, quietly and suddenly, the gold ring disappeared from her finger. He hadn't even noticed it at first. Eventually, though, he noticed she had stopped fighting all-nighters. She even stayed when he hadn't asked her too. He had to start telling her to go home, get some sleep.

Her eyes had been red a lot in those days, but he'd attributed it to lack of sleep and forced her home at the end of her 8 hour work day. He'd never suspected anything to be wrong, and she'd never given any indication for him to believe otherwise. By the time he'd realized the ring was gone and put two and two together, it seemed too late and too awkward of a situation to bring up. So he stayed quiet about it, and so did she.

Pepper never really dated after that. Occasionally, she'd strike up a relationship with someone, but her work schedule always prevented it from going anywhere. He would have felt sorry for her, but he hated it when she was dating anyone. She was all he had, and he didn't like to share.

"Pepper," He said into the intercom, "Meet me in the garage in half an hour. We're going out for dinner tonight."


	2. Fidelity

**Title: **Fidelity  
**Author:** citizenkat  
**Theme: #**31 Joke  
**Rating:** PG-13 (for a few f-bombs)  
**Summary:** Pepper refuses talk to him, so Tony won't stop talking.

Tony Stark would not stop talking.

"What's the best thing about twenty-eight year olds?" He asked over the intercom, his voice echoing throughout the mansion.

He didn't know which room Pepper was in, so he addressed his PA system everywhere. There was not a room in the house where she couldn't hear him. She couldn't turn the intercoms off, incase he really did need her for something. She was still his assistant, after all. She still had to be able to assist him if needed.

"There are twenty of them."

Tony had been talking at her for hours. If she didn't want to talk to him, fine. It wasn't going to stop him from talking to her.

He couldn't stand one more day of the silence. She didn't want to hear his apologies. She wouldn't tolerate his excuses. She had told him that several times, and it was fair enough. If she didn't want apologies and excuses, he would tell her stories and every joke he'd ever heard. Occasionally, when he couldn't think of anything to say, he sang. It was his secret talent, nobody knew he could sing…well, except for Pepper now.

Tony had fucked up. Bad. Far worse than he ever had in his entire life. He had sworn to himself several times that he would not fuck this up. He couldn't, it was too precious. Too important. But he was Tony Stark, so it was only inevitable that he would fuck it up eventually.

--

The afternoon he had walked into the living room to find her hunched over the coffee table was forever burned into his memory. His mind replayed it to him over and over again in his dreams, endlessly taunting him with his greatest failure. There had been a magazine sitting on the table next to her, and he knew without looking what was on the cover.

"Pepper…"

She looked at him then, her blue eyes cold and angry. If looks could kill, he would have been a dead man.

She rose to her feet as fluidly as a cat. "What did you do?" she demanded, throwing the magazine at him. He couldn't recall if she had shouted or whispered the words. It didn't matter. It was the venom in her voice, not the volume, which tore at him.

He glanced at the magazine lying at his feet. In the photo he recognized the nameless brunette from the night before. 'Trouble in Paradise?' the headline read in bold letters.

"Pepper –" He started again.

She cut him off. He couldn't remember what she had said. Couldn't remember what he had said in response. He couldn't remember much of that angry exchange, really. All he remembered was the distinct feeling of his damaged heart being ripped apart. He had wished it would give out, just to end the pain.

It almost had, when she headed for the door. He moved to stop her, but she had turned to him and called out "No!" The way it ripped from her throat, he wondered if it hurt her as much to say it as it had hurt him. Tony Stark was not a man who took 'no' for an answer, and yet there he was, rendered immobilized by that very word.

All he could do was stand there as she ran out the door, and seemingly out of his life.

He would have followed her to the ends of the Earth, but he couldn't take a single damn step.

He didn't know how long he'd stood there. But he did know he hadn't sleep at all that night.

The next day, he heard the faint sound of Jarvis speaking, and found her locked away in her office. She didn't speak to him at all that day, but the fact that she had came into work made him hopeful. He had no idea where she was staying, he assumed a hotel somewhere. He was sure Jarvis knew, but she must have sworn the A.I. into secrecy, because it wouldn't say.

She didn't speak to him for the next two days, either. She e-mailed him his schedule for the day, and e-mailed again to follow up. On the fourth day, she came down to his workshop, a stack of papers in hand. She'd needed him to go over them and sign them. She wouldn't look at his face, instead she focused her gaze on his neck, and she refused to speak to him any more than was absolutely necessary.

He was okay with that, because at least she was speaking to him. And as long as she continued coming in to work, he could work on fixing this.

But Pepper Potts was stubborn, and refused to give an inch.

--

By the second week, selfishly, he had tried to rationalize his actions.

They had been fighting at lot lately over the whole Iron Man thing. She felt he was being too reckless. He was going to get himself killed.

She thought he had died once. That was how this whole mess began.

He had come back from one of his missions more worse for the wear than usual. He had actually had chunks of the suit lodged in his back. It had taken surgery and a four day stay at the hospital to fix him up that time. The day after his surgery, when he had finally been allowed visitors, she went to his room in the ICU and panicked. He had looked dead, lying there in that bed, slumbering away in a deep medically induced sleep. She had hit the panic button and screamed for a nurse.

He woken up in all the commotion. When things had settled down and it was only Pepper left in the room, he tried to find the words to say. But his doped up brain couldn't think of any, so he'd teased her like he always did.

She hadn't liked that. She was resentful that he cared more for his own twisted notions of responsibility than he did for his own life. Than he did for her, apparently.

He was resentful she felt that way. For all her support, for all her encouraging words, she didn't understand what he was doing at all. She always said she did, said she was proud of him for what he was trying to do here. But she couldn't see the bigger picture, and it frustrated him.

It was their first of many fights over the subject, there in the hospital. It put a strain on their relationship that never fully healed, and each following fight only added to it.

Then there was the two day conference he had to attend in New York City. Pepper didn't always accompany him to such events, but he'd asked her to go with him anyway. Pleaded with her when she'd said no. For reasons he didn't quite understand, he wanted her to be there with him. But she was simply too busy to go jetting off to New York in the middle of the work week. He told her it was his work, for his company. It could wait for two days. She'd insisted it couldn't, and he'd gone off to New York alone.

He couldn't remember if the brunette had been there for the conference, or if she'd been a reporter, photographer, or cocktail waitress. It hadn't mattered. He was drunk and lonely, and she was there and willing. So he'd taken her back to his hotel room.

As soon as he was done with her, and realized just what he'd done, he bolted from the room. He spent that night curled up on a couch in the lobby with a bottle of scotch he'd bought from the hotel bar.

He skipped the second day of the conference, and headed back to Los Angeles. He knew before the plane even took off that Pepper knew what had happened. That was how fast word spread in the digital age. He'd spent most that afternoon driving aimlessly around LA. Eventually he realized there was absolutely nothing he could do to fix this. It was completely out of his power. So he headed home and prayed she would still be there.

--

By the beginning of the third week, he felt like the world's biggest ass for trying to pin this all on Pepper. It was his own damn fault.

He was a man who had everything, and he would have given it all to undo that one night.

No matter how much money you had, you couldn't change the past. He was learning that the hard way.

On Wednesday of that third week, he'd caught a glimpse of Pepper's eyes as she turned to leave his workshop. In that one small instant, he found depths of pain and broken hollowness that echoed his own.

From that instant, a new hope was born. There was a chance he could fix this, if he was willing to fight hard enough.

So on Thursday, he had begun talking at her.

Today was Friday, and he was still talking. He would keep this up for a hundred years, if that was what it took. If he ran out of breath before then, so be it.

"What's more offensive than a dead baby?"


End file.
